Fabrizio De André, the revered Italian singer/songwriter, created a deep and enduring body of work over the course of his career from the 1960s through the 1990s. With these translations I have tried to render his words into an English that reads naturally without straying too far from the Italian. The translations decipher De André's lyrics without trying to preserve rhyme schemes or to make the resulting English lyric work with the melody of the song.

"Inverno" is, according to De André, a song against the pursuit of guarantees when it comes to love, as if love were like an automobile. One must remain open to love, but without trying to condition when it might arise and when it might die.

The fog rises o'er the white meadows
like a cypress in the graveyards.
A bell tower that doesn’t seem real
marks the border between earth and heaven.

But you who go, but you who remain,
you will see the snow go away tomorrow.
Past joys will flower again
with the warm wind of another summer.

Light, too, seems to die
in the uncertain shadow of a becoming
where even dawn becomes evening,
and faces seem like wax skulls.

But you who go, but you who remain,
the snow will also die tomorrow.
Love will still pass near us
in the season of the hawthorn.

The tired earth under the snow
sleeps the silence of a heavy slumber.
The winter harvests its struggles
of a thousand centuries,
since an ancient dawn.

But you who are here, why do you stay?
Another winter returns tomorrow,
another snow will fall to console the fields,
another snow will fall on the graveyards.

Tutti morimmo a stento, released in 1968, was one of the first concept albums in Italy. In De André's own words, the album "speaks of death, not of bubble gum death with little bones, but of psychological death, moral death, mental death, that a normal person can encounter during his lifetime." After the success of Volume I, De André was provided for this next album a cutting edge recording studio complete with an 80-member orchestra, directed by Gian Piero Reverberi, and a children's chorus. The whole project was under the direction of Gian Piero's brother Gian Franco Reverberi. This album also met with commercial success, becoming the highest selling album in Italy in 1968. In 1969 a version of the album was made with De André re-recording the vocals in English. The album was not officially released.